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Jason Collins Comes Home

On Monday night, Jason Collins played his first home game as a Brooklyn Net, completing an emotional ten-month-long journey that began with just a dozen words, published in Sports Illustrated: “I’m a 34-year-old NBA center. I’m black. And I’m gay.”

It was a homecoming in more ways than one: Collins began his professional career with the Nets, in 2001. Affectionately nicknamed Twin (his brother, Jarron, also played in the N.B.A.), he was appreciated for his tough defense and leadership. After failing to make the postseason for the first time in seven years, the Nets traded Collins to Memphis in 2007, and he played sparingly for four other teams in the next five seasons, fading into the background as a his career wound down.

Things changed abruptly after the 2012-13 regular season, when Collins wrote about his sexuality for Sports Illustrated, becoming the first openly gay athlete in any of the four major American sports leagues. Yet, with his contract with the Washington Wizards about to expire, Collins’s prospects for becoming the first openly gay athlete to actually play in the N.B.A. were uncertain. Almost thirty-five years old, he was coming off one of his worst seasons, averaging 1.1 points a game.

When the season started, in October, Collins remained a free agent, but he continued to work out, just in case. Months passed. Finally, in February, his former team, looking to add a backup center, invited him to try out. The Nets signed Collins to a ten-day contract on February 23rd. So far, he has provided a much needed defensive presence in the low post while the team’s starting center, Kevin Garnett, battles back spasms. Off the court, Collins eloquently handled the horde of media at every stop of a four-game road trip last week.

Leading up to Monday night’s game, some people drew comparisons with Jackie Robinson’s first game with the Dodgers at Ebbets Field, almost sixty-seven years ago. But, while Robinson played on opening day in front of a divided stadium that wasn’t even at capacity, Collins received a standing ovation from the sellout crowd when he entered Monday’s contest, with two minutes and forty-one seconds remaining. But Collins was a presence in Barclays all night, as fans chanted his name and held up banners of support. Even though the Nets were ahead of the Chicago Bulls by seventeen points when Collins checked into the game, the crowd inhaled sharply whenever he touched the ball, hoping for a shot attempt. With eleven seconds left, Collins faced the basket from the right corner and took a jumper that barely grazed the rim. The crowd let out a sigh, then stood again and cheered as the Nets won.

For Johnny Salvatore, a member of the Brooklyn Brigade, a group of approximately twenty Nets fans who attend games together every three weeks or so, it was an emotional moment. Salvatore, who lives in Astoria, Queens, had a gay uncle who passed away nineteen years ago. With less than four minutes left, the Brigade began chanting Collins’s name, which slowly reverberated throughout the arena. “I was chanting for all the fear and shame [my uncle] had to go through in life for being born gay,” Salvatore said. “I was chanting for No. 98 because of everything that number means.” Collins wears the number in honor of Matthew Shepherd, who was murdered in 1998. “I was chanting to let every gay person within earshot know that we’re in a new era,” Salvatore continued. “The bigoted past will no longer be tolerated.”

Tom Lorenzo, an editor of the blog NetsDaily and a season-ticket holder during Collins’s rookie season, said that he felt “a sense of pride” in supporting the organization that signed the first openly gay player in the history of the N.B.A. But the game, he said, “shouldn’t be about Nets fans owning the moment, it should be about progress, and I don’t mind all N.B.A. fans taking ownership of the moment.” The former N.B.A. commissioner David Stern, who attended Monday’s game, seemed to agree. He told the New York Times, “I hope someday we can say to somebody, ‘I was there,’ and they’ll ask, ‘What are you talking about?’ because this is really sports catching up with America.”

In the Nets’ locker room after the game, Collins buttoned his black-and-blue flannel shirt, his back turned away from the entrance, where dozens of reporters assembled to hear him speak. The star of the night let out an exclamation of shock when he saw the crowd gathered around him, but quickly turned his focus back to basketball. When asked what the night meant, Collins said that he wouldn’t know until he retired. With the Nets reportedly ready to sign him to a second ten-day contract, there were more pressing matters at hand. “As of right now, I’m only concerned with playing games, and next up is Memphis.”